Documents Live, a web authoring and publishing system
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Table of contents
First published on Sunday, Aug 31, 2025 and last modified on Wednesday, May 27, 2026 by François Chaplais.
1 Introduction
Documents Live implements most of the xcolor package.
In practice, color usage should be done in two steps.
- a color is defined by its name and its value
- the color is used in the document through its name
2 Defining colors
Documents Live has a predefined set of colors which is pretty extensive. You can see it here .
If you want to define your own color, we advise you to use a color picker and copy the hex value (6 letters/digits) to the clipboard. Then you define the color in the preamble of your document as follows.
\definecolor{color name}{HTML}{hex value}The hex value should NOT be preceded with the \specialStorage{2} hash character. Note that color names and hex values are case insensitive. Example:
\definecolor{testColor}{HTML}{f3d8b7}3 Opacity
The opacity of a color is defined by a percentage. A totally opaque color has an opacity of 100; it has the same effect as if the opacity had not been specified. A totally transparent color has an opacity of 0; it has the same effect as if the color had not been applied.
To add opacity to a color, append the color name with a question mark ? followed by the opacity. For instance, testColor?70 applies the color testColor with an opacity of 70%.
Remark it is much simpler to define a color by blending colors first and define the opacity after, than to blend colors which already have an opacity. Remember that “transparent” is not the same as “white”.
4 Using color in text
There are three text color dommand.
4.1 \textcolor
\textcolor{color name}{text}
set the color of text to the prescribed color. Example: This text has the blue color.
4.2 \colorbox
\colorbox{color name}{text}
set the background color of text to the prescribed color. The text color is automatically adjusted for improved readability. Example: This text has a blue background color.
4.3 \fcolorbox
\fcolorbox{frame color}{background color}{text}
frames the text with a border of color frame color and backgound color background color. Example: This text has a red border and a turquoise background.
5 Color for Documents Live objects
You apply color to Documents Live objects by wrapping them in a latexDiv environment and styling the latexDiv itself. latexDiv uses the same color names as the other commands.
6 Summary
Summary 1 (color usage)
Colors are defined using the \definecolor command in the preamble. Then the color name can be used in all LaTeX commands that use color.